What drives brand decisions in Québec

February 27, 2009

Playing the retirement lottery

This billboard for Fidelity Investments caught my attention
while stuck in Toronto traffic.

“Retire on schedule.Your schedule.”

While
I’m nowhere close to retirement and even if I have a generally well laid out
strategy for my retirement savings, it made me wonder what retiring “on
schedule” would actually mean. Semi-retirement in my fifties? Full retirement
by 65? Work in some capacity beyond 65? Hard to know for sure.

Yet when asked by Ipsos Reid what they expect to do when
they’re 65, Canadians gave clear answers:

13% expect to be working full-time.

40% expect to be semi-retired/working part-time.

47% expect to be retired and no longer working.

(Source: 19th annual Ipsos Reid/RBC RRSP poll,
conducted from October 16 to 23, 2008 via an online survey of 3,113 Canadian
boomers (ages 50 to 69 with assets of at least $100,000). The sample includes
934 boomers who say they plan to retire in the next 5 years and 139 who plan to
retire within 5 years and who are also business owners.)

Compared to Canadians in the ROC, Quebeckers can't wait to retire.

They are the least likely to say they expect to be working
full time when they’re 65 and most likely to say they will be fully retired by
then.

Perhaps even more telling is the fact that if they had
enough money to retire today, Quebeckers are significantly more likely to say
they would retire immediately (39% compared to the national average of 27%).

That should in part explain Quebeckers’ attraction to
lotteries. 64% of Quebeckers bought lottery tickets in the past year compared
to 54% of Canadian in the rest of the country (PMB 2008).